The invention relates generally to radar target detection and more particularly to enhancing the detection of moving targets without causing collapsing loss.
Conventional surveillance radar displays present detection information in the form of a map. As the radar antenna scans, new data is displayed while the information from previous scans fades from the display. Lack of sufficient persistence in the display makes it difficult to recognize moving targets since the previous map has nearly faded, and is not available for reference during the current scan. However, even if adequate persistence were provided, noise from previous scans would remain on the screen and compete with signals along the tracks from small moving targets, thus degrading the detection performance of the radar systems. This signal-to-noise ratio penalty due to the addition of noise-only with signal-pulse-noise is often called collapsing loss.